daffodils

Four hours before the equinox, the ground is white, with more snow swirling down. The miniature daffodils dangle from their stalks like deflated balloons.

Patches of blue. The mourning dove’s incessant cooing finally comes to an end, leaving the daffodils’ ensemble of horns to their silence.

A gray cloud ceiling brightens toward the horizon. A phoebe stridently announces himself to the echoey hillside and the daffodils trembling in the breeze.

Bright blear of a sun in a sky more white than blue. Its light reflecting off the window behind me means I am lit on all sides as I peer […]

The appeal of a cool, clear morning is beginning to wear as thin as the splay of browning daffodil leaves below the porch. I lapse into fantasies of fog and […]

Clear and cold. Frost glitters in the low-angled sun. The miniature daffodils are frozen in positions of prayer.

A brief lull in the rain at dawn, darkness full of the sound of rushing water and the dim shapes of the first daffodils, face-down in the dead grass.

Daffodils are out of the ground around the old dog statue, the surrounding yard moldy-looking from the light frost. A distant bluebird.

After 24 hours of rain, water streams from the mountain’s every pore. The daffodils’ last trumpet points toward the forest.

Looking through a series of thin screens: swirling snowflakes, greening lilac, yellow forsythia, bare trees, holey clouds.

Rainy, breezy and intermittently bright. The zigzag flight of a phoebe finding breakfast above the daffodils.

Warm rain. Phoebe and robin drown out the night chant of peepers. All the daffodils’ cups have turned bottoms-up.

Snowflakes dance wildly but all the daffodils can do is nod and sway. O sweet Canada, sings the sparrow.

The early miniature daffodils are mostly done, hanging limp as burst balloons. Two chipping sparrows hop among them, pecking at the dirt.